That makes me nervous, too. I suspect that the problem was caused by a bit of nasy code embedded in some object that you downloaded from somewhere. I've had downloads that caused my game to crash, too.

Right now I have a folder that I'm slowly whittling down, named "Bad File In Here Somewhere". Every once in a while I slip a few more things into my game to see if it crashes. It goes slowly because most of the time I just not in the mood for testing things, and when I am, it takes about an hour per test.

Assuming it's not something caused by 2 downloads working together or against each other, the 50% method is fastest.

1) Put 50% of "unknown" stuff in. Keep this stuff segregated from your known good stuff.
2) Does it work? Yes: repeat step 1. No: Remove that half and put the other half in.
3) Does it work? Yes: repeat step 1. No: treat the two halves as separate problems. Or you've got a corrupt Maxis file. Or you've got something that interacts with an "known good" file.

This will take at most n iterations where 2^n > number of downloads > 2^(n-1)

Remember, 2^n gets real big real fast!

This assumes you've checked it all out with SimWardrobe's Hack Conflict Detector and Delphy's Download Organizer and resolved problems that they detect.

Well I'm too much of a coward, or maybe too impatient I guess. I've done the whittle down downloads thing so many times in the past.

The Hood is gone.

The odd thing about it is that all my other Hoods appear to be fine. I have had problems where the game just wouldn't start, which seem to have been about downloads. This didn't feel the same somehow. I've never seen the loading screen flash black like that before, it spooked me.

Yup. Mr. Procrastinator has been using the binary division method. It's STILL slow. It takes between 20 minutes and a half hour to start my game, so most of the times when I want to start my game, I don't want to mess with testing downloads.

Addendum: The other problem is that the crash is a major pain. The game stops during the loading process. Recovery requires, at a minimum, using the Task Manager to blow it away. Sometimes it requires a hard power-cycling reboot.

The place in gets hung up is "Proscribing Plebian Palates" if that means anything. I just now tried to start with some new downloads from MTS2 and it happened again, dang it. It gets old very, very fast.

No, that is what I am saying... it wasn't that kind of crash. The game had loaded, I had been playing in Sant'Isadora, the base neighbourhood's Downtown, for some time.
Then I tried to go to its University sub-neighbourhood.

So I really, really don't think it was the fault of a download.

Not that it matters now. I just wondered if that sort of problem had ever hit anyone else.